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Iraq’s parliament will meet next week to begin the process of forming a new government, officials say.

Iraqis who fled their villages gather near a Kurdish checkpoint, in the Khazer area between the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Kurdish city of Irbil, northern Iraq, Thursday. (Hussein Malla / AP)

By Diaa HadidAssociated Press

Thu., June 26, 2014

BAGHDAD—Iraq’s parliament will meet next week to begin the process of forming a new government, officials said Thursday, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed the United States for his army’s inability to stop Sunni Muslim insurgents who are threatening his grip on the country.

In an interview with the BBC’s Arabic-language service, al-Maliki said the Iraqi army would have been able to block the insurgents’ advance into northern and western Iraq if the U.S. had moved more quickly to deliver fighter planes that Baghdad had purchased.

Apparently referring to F-16 jets that U.S. officials have said would arrive no earlier than September, al-Maliki said Iraqi officials had bought 36 of the planes and thought they would have received them by now.

“I’ll be frank and say that we were deluded when we signed the contract,” al-Maliki told the British broadcaster in his first interview with an international news organization since the insurgents seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, earlier this month.

“We should have sought to buy other jet fighters like British, French and Russian, to secure the air cover for our forces,” he said. “If we had air cover, we would have averted what had happened.”

The announcement came amid growing pressure on al-Maliki, a Shiite, to share more political power with minority groups, including Sunnis and ethnic Kurds.

Al-Maliki, whom critics accuse of running a Shiite-dominated dictatorship, has said he is open to forming a coalition government including all religious and ethnic groups. But he has not signalled he would be willing to forgo a third term as prime minister.

Al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition won a plurality of seats in the April parliamentary elections. But many Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers say he must step aside, blaming his leadership for fuelling the insurgency.

Iraqi forces and insurgents — led by an Al Qaeda offshoot known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — continued to battle Thursday on multiple fronts.

Private Iraqi media reported that the country’s forces airlifted commandos to a university in Tikrit, hometown of the late dictator Saddam Hussein, and the helicopters came under heavy fire from insurgents. The city about 160 kilometres north of the capital, Baghdad, was seized by insurgents two weeks ago in a dramatic offensive that has seen most Sunni-majority areas of northern and western Iraq fall out of government hands.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Iraqi villagers fleeing advances by Sunni militants crowded at a checkpoint on the edge of the country’s Kurdish-controlled territory Thursday seeking shelter in the relative safety of the self-rule region, The Associated Press reports.

While many villagers appeared to have been granted access, hundreds of Shiite refugees were still hoping to be let in but were facing delays because they lacked sponsors on the other side.

One of the refugees, who gave only her nickname of Umm Alaa, fearing retribution, said she and hundreds of others with her had left their village of Quba and another nearby hamlet during the militants’ initial assault on June 10 to seek shelter in nearby communities that were then attacked Wednesday. Another, who agreed to be identified only named Huda, tried to calm her 10-year-old son Mohammed, who was crying of thirst.

“They will kill every Shiite man, and they will burn every Shiite house. Nobody has stayed in Quba. Every single Shiite has left,” he said, echoing the fears of many interviewed Thursday.

A spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency, Adrian Edwards, last week said the number of people in Iraq forced from their homes is estimated to be 1 million so far this year.

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